Negotiations moving at incredible pace: Sergio Gor on India-US trade deal

Ahead of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s India visit next week, US ambassador Sergio Gor said on Thursday that the Secretary’s visit to Mumbai will be more business-focused and the External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is expected to be there. Rubio is expected to be in Mumbai and Jamnagar from October 19-22, after visiting Uzbekistan on October 17-19.

Rubio will also meet “some of the folks” at Reliance during his trip to Jamnagar in Gujarat.

During an interactive session at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, the US ambassador said that negotiations for a bilateral trade deal were moving at an “incredible pace”, and the “big items are done”.

Asked about the status of the negotiations, Gor said, “I won’t like to get into too many details at this stage and let the ministers announce that. But in the grand scheme of things, big items are done.” “We’re actively engaged… Within three weeks of arriving here, we announced a trade deal. The European Union trade deal took almost 20 years. So, we’re at an incredible pace… I am confident that we will have a trade deal here, as you heard Dr Jaishankar say, and we are very close to landing it,” Gor said.

The US envoy also underlined that this was a “very complex trade deal”. A lot of smaller countries do not have “tens of thousands of points to figure out”, he said, adding, “…A country like India with 1.4 billion people is a complex place, and so matching everything won’t be done overnight. But the big picture, the big framework, the big items are done.”

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Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 27 years now. Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting and writing explainers and analysis on foreign affairs for about 19 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper. He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism ‘2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He won the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award, 2023, for the second time for his reporting of the Oct 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury’s special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban’s capture of power in mid-August, 2021. ... Read More